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Death March

In his second novel, Mark T. Mustian appears to confront an enormous subject: the Turkish deportation of Armenians during World War I, when hundreds of thousands died amid a hellish march into Syria — an expulsion that has, outside Turkey, often been labeled as genocide. But in truth, Mustian, a writer and lawyer from Tallahassee, Fla., who is himself distantly of Armenian heritage, tells a story that probes a timeless array of life’s general adversities: the tricks of memory that enable us to carry on with our daily existence; the brash decisions and subsequent regrets of the young; the ever present need for forgiveness; the way a single event can be subject to many interpretations. Mustian embodies the intractability of these difficulties in the image of an Armenian girl with mismatched eyes, “the light eye questioning, the dark eye confirming.” She sees the past and the present, the good and the bad, our side and theirs. Her mystery is life’s mystery.

That mystery is most deeply felt by the protagonist of “The Gendarme,” a 92-year-old widower named Emmett Conn, who has just been told he has a brain tumor. Born Ahmet Khan in Turkey, he was so badly injured while fighting for the Ottoman Army at Gallipoli that when he was removed from the battlefield he was mistaken for a British soldier and sent to an Allied hospital. He recovered, but not without losing much of his memory. He married his American nurse, and together they returned to her homeland.

But now Conn’s tumor is precipitating graphic dreams, forming a ghastly narrative that casts him as a 17-year-old Turkish gendarme, escorting Armenians into exile. In his nightly visions, Conn becomes a perpetrator of atrocities: a murderer and a rapist. But when he falls in love with one of the deportees, the girl with the bewitching eyes, he begins to expiate his sins. The dreams, of course, reveal to Conn the reality of his teenage self. If one injury granted him a new life, another now asks for the old life back.

By approaching the Armenian deportation indirectly, through Conn’s dreams and opaque memories, Mustian broadens his field of vision, and ours. We learn the affecting details of Conn’s wife’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease and how his two daughters essentially abandon him in his senescence, preoccupied by the complexities of their own lives. As Conn apprehends the magnitude of his offenses, his hope for redemption rests increasingly with his maladjusted mixed-race grandson. “You want him as your extension. Your surrogate to live your life over,” his daughter tells him. “Is there that much you regret?”

Mustian refuses to flinch when describing the grim realities that resurface in Conn’s thoughts of the past: “And then comes the horseman . . . directing his steed’s hoof squarely onto the infant’s skull, crushing it in a tiny burst of liquid, a smallish squish of sound.” But too many of his words read as if lifted from a police report, variations of “An incident on our second day out exhibited the decline in our relationship.” Mustian’s characters don’t speak their lines so much as recite them. “My shame is boundless,” Conn declares, “my guilt so heavy it outweighs even truth.”

Eventually, Conn tries to find out what happened to the Armenian girl who haunts his dreams. In the process, he comes to a dismaying realization: “I am thinking, suddenly, of these hells scattered beyond just my own. Little, big, black, white, old, new, tired, alive. Pulling, with a force wrought from God, curling, perhaps intertwining. I am alone here. Are they not also alone?”